Day 12 — oil pastels

a work in progress….

5″ x 7″

9″ x 9″
Last night I worked on metal projects. Filing, sanding, soldering. I realized that I’ve gotten sloppy and will be remedying that. I also realized that my metal working equipment needs to be consolidated, efficient-ized, and I for sure need a ventilation hood for the soldering station. That stuff is pretty strong when not properly ventilated.
Tuesday I finally made those plant tags I was talking about to attach to some contested plants in my backyard. These are now attached to the plants in question:

After finishing those I decided to play with some collage and laminate it…. unfortunately, I learned the hard way that two layers of cardboard going through my laminator = pain, sadness, broken things, and much much much pulling to get things unstuck. Here’s all that’s left:

(Luckily, I had some awesome help to get this unstuck from the machine. I do believe that the machine works again, too.)
No picture today. This morning I started working on fixing up (yet another) half-finished painting. Still acrylic. I’ll be trying out the oils later this week, I think.
I went to visit a friend yesterday morning and on the way back from brunch, asked to stop at a thrift store….. turns out that they were having a special event where everything was half off, and so we discovered….

I scored big and got these 28 tubes of that oil-hybrid paint (the stuff that you can thin/clean up with plain water, but somehow is still an oil paint) paint for just $12.50!!!! AWESOME.
Started out like this (long forgotten annoying painting in a pile somewhere):

Then between Day 1 and this morning went to this (which I found too busy and still annoying and even a little bit embarrassing to post)

And at lunchtime I brought out a little paint to tone it down:
4″ x 6″
Still not my favorite, but I will grudgingly admit some improvement. NON-grudgingly, I will admit to being pretty darn cheery that I got my paints out in the middle of the day for a sanctioned break 🙂